Trotsky
Page 57
There is no evidence that Trotsky gave his papers, numbering more than four hundred items, to Nikolaevsky. A letter from Zborowski to Moscow, dated 7 November 1936, sheds some light, however, and as we have seen the part played by Mark Zborowski was crucial:
[Lev Sedov] summoned me at noon. ‘Neighbour’ [L. Estrin] also came to the café. ‘Sonny’ announced that during the night the GPU had stolen the ‘Old Man’s’ archives from the Institute. ‘Sonny∍ said there and then that only four people knew of its location: himself, ‘Neighbour’, Nikolaevsky and myself. The first three are beyond suspicion. That leaves ‘Mack’ [i.e. Zborowski]. We have only known him [Sedov said] for two years. But, after a pause, ‘Sonny’ said he personally trusted ‘Mack’ one hundred per cent. We have to make sure [Sedov said] that the second archive, which is in a secret location, is still secure. [At this point, in the margin of his letter, Zborowski noted: ‘We have already photographed this archive.’] They are worried about a police investigation which, although it will not find the archive, may uncover other things. I discovered that in my absence Nikolaevsky, ‘Sonny’ and ‘Neighbour’ had discussed the possibility that ‘Mack’ had stolen the archive. But they finally abandoned their suspicions and told the police, ‘This is the work of the GPU.’ [The French police in fact suspected Boris Souvarine, whom they held to be a ‘dangerous Communist’.46] When ‘Mack’ was suggested as the culprit, ‘Neighbour’ declared: ‘No way. You’d have to be a genius to play a game like that for two years. I remember very well the way he reacted to the executions in Moscow.’47
As a sort of mediator between Lev Sedov and the Paris Institute, Nikolaevsky clearly came into possession of part of the archive, and after Trotsky’s death felt free to deal with it as he saw fit. Thus it was that Trotsky’s History found its way to the Hoover Institution.
Trotsky’s interpretation of the events of 1917 is severely constrained within the canonical framework of Marxist theory, and is thus fundamentally limited and narrow, rejecting the possibility that any other view may be valid. ‘The main thing,’ he wrote, ‘was that the February revolution was only an outer shell within which the nucleus of the October revolution lay concealed. The history of the February revolution is the history of the way the October nucleus freed itself of its conciliatory defects. Had the vulgar democrats dared to state the course of events objectively, they too would hardly have been able to invite anyone to return to February, just as you cannot ask an ear of corn to return to the seed that gave it birth.’48
The predetermined, pre-ordained nature of the values and arguments used by Trotsky, the rigid class point of view and absolute certainty in the historical correctness of the approach, undoubtedly constitute the weakest feature of his otherwise outstanding History. Adhering to the well-established landmarks of 1917, he doggedly repeats the extremely dubious contention that the February revolution was doomed from the start, and that by the end of June it was politically exhausted.49 He could not or would not see that February had only opened the door to democracy. Nor did he understand that it was not the Bolsheviks who had made the October revolution, but above all the First World War, the weak regime, and the profound social crisis, the indignation of the ‘lower orders’. The Bolsheviks turned out to be the most receptive and radically oriented force capable of exploiting these conditions. Trotsky was unable to recognize that ‘skipping over’ the democratic stage, represented by the February revolution, implied a willingness to resort to the use of force.
Trotsky saw the use of force as the trigger of revolution. Once the proletariat activated that trigger, it would carry out its just cause. The end—revolution—thus justified the means. In his History Trotsky explained the inner mechanism of the revolution in a few simple strokes:
What gave the coup the character of a sharp blow, with the minimum number of casualties, was the combination of a revolutionary conspiracy, a proletarian uprising and the struggle of the peasant garrison … The Party directed the coup; the main moving force was the proletariat; armed workers’ detachments were the fist of the uprising; but the outcome was decided by the struggle of the heavyweight peasant garrison.50
Unlike later mendacious Soviet accounts, Trotsky stated that the coup had taken no more than twenty-four hours and that ‘perhaps no more than 25-30,000 people’ had taken part in it.51
Trotsky was prepared to admit that the democracy brought about by the February revolution had been a great achievement, but he claimed it had done nothing to advance ‘class war’. In other words, first the fabric of society must be destroyed, and then it must be reconstructed on new lines. The assumption that social change can succeed only when old structures have been destroyed lay at the heart of the failure of the Bolshevik experiment. Having first reduced everything to ashes, the Bolsheviks then proceeded to build their barracks-style socialism. He dismissed as pointless the question of whether the revolution justified the number of victims it caused. And he added: ‘If gentry culture gave the world such words as tsar, pogrom and knout, then October has internationalized such terms as Bolshevik, Soviet and Five-year Plan. This alone justifies the proletarian revolution, if it needs justification.’52 Writing these words in 1932, Trotsky might perhaps be forgiven for not advancing as even more characteristic terms of Soviet reality such words as Gulag, totalitarian bureaucracy and primitive dogmatism. Even when he was perfectly aware of the extent of Stalin’s terror, Trotsky did not abandon his optimistic view of the future, nor his activism. Writing from Mexico on 3 February 1937 to his supporter Angelica Balabanova, he asked: ‘What is pessimism? It’s a passive and pathetic complaint against history. But how can one complain against history? You have to take it as it is, and when it commits extraordinary swinishness, you have to pummel it with your fists. It’s the only way to survive on this earth.’53 Pummelling history, and hoping everything would find its proper place, was all that was left for him to do.
Trotsky’s methods as a historian deserve mention. Having read a vast array of the most varied literature, he would collect the quotations, speeches and documents most suitable for his purpose, and stick them in a logical sequence on sheets of paper in accordance with his plan for the current work, whether it was an article, a chapter or a book. Between the mounted quotations on these long ‘scrolls’ he would then insert the appropriate commentary, argument or reflection. That would provide the first draft. Usually a second draft would then be written, with additional material and further refinement. And finally a third draft would be regarded as the finished version. Some parts of the History were only inserted after much more rewriting. The manuscript in the Hoover Archives includes chapters that were never published.
As a synthesis of history and memoirs, Trotsky’s History was a literary achievement the like of which he would never attain thereafter. Although, as we have seen in his letter to Balabanova, he was putting on a brave face, the Moscow trials knocked the wind out of him. The Revolution Betrayed presented its editor, Victor Serge, with a tough job, as he wrote to Lev Sedov in June 1937: ‘The book has not been well written or constructed, but has been hurriedly sewn together out of various material … a mass of almost literal repetitions and longueurs … He shouldn’t have killed the book by overloading it …’54 Trotsky was writing the book, however, in Norway, with the combined threat of the NKVD and deportation hanging over him. Prinkipo by comparison had been a writer’s paradise.
Despite the authorial egocentrism, which is only to be expected in view of the author’s intense involvement in the events, Trotsky’s History is a masterly account of the vast Russian drama of 1917, written for the most part in a reserved and detached style. It contains philosophical and psychological insight, combined with the vigorous argumentation needed to refute the lies being peddled in Moscow and elsewhere. As he wrote in 1933: ‘Just as shopkeepers when they grow rich invent new and more appropriate genealogies for themselves, so the bureaucratic class that has emerged from the revolution has created its own history. Hundreds of duplic
ating machines are at its service. But the quantity will do nothing to raise its scholarly quality.’55 He wrote in virtually the same terms in the preface to his book The Stalinist School of Falsification, which was published at nearly the same time as the History and which consists of a number of original documents, three unpublished speeches and his letter to Istpart.
The basis of this letter of more than one hundred pages, listing seventy points, was the response he had made to a Party history questionnaire of 1927 (see p. 80). Citing a host of documents, he exposed the way the rewriting of history had evolved in Moscow, and apart from Stalin he also blamed Zinoviev, Bukharin, Yaroslavsky, Olminsky and Lunacharsky, the latter three of whom, he claimed, carried out whatever order the secretariat chose to issue.56 Rejecting the accusation that he was a Menshevik, and pointing out that he had broken with Menshevism in 1904, he wrote: ‘I never called myself nor regarded myself as a Menshevik … As I have stated several times, in my differences with the Bolsheviks on a number of questions of principles, I was in the wrong.’57
Writing in 1931, Trotsky knew that Stalin was exerting himself to discredit his, Trotsky’s, position during the Brest-Litovsk treaty negotiations. He wrote that the policy of delaying ‘the moment of capitulation to the Hohenzollerns’ had been approved by the majority of the Bolshevik leadership: ‘During the Brest negotiations the question was entirely about whether or not the revolutionary situation in Germany in early 1918 had developed so far that by not continuing the war (we had no army!) we would nevertheless not have to sign the peace. Experience was to show that this was not the situation.’58 Stalin was now trying to create the impression that Lenin had decided his policy only after consulting him.
The ‘tradition’ of twisting the truth about the past to suit present policy would last for many decades. As we have seen, Sorin and Stasova wrote to Stalin in May 1938 with suggestions for ‘amendments’ to Lenin’s notes concerning him at the beginning of 1918.59 Trotsky now bitterly regretted not having taken with him from Moscow many documents relating to the pre-Revolutionary period and the first years of Soviet rule, especially the minutes of the Revolutionary Military Council, as well as his orders and instructions as People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Military and Naval Affairs and Transport, and his voluminous correspondence. He particularly felt the absence of the archives of the Society of Former Political Prisoners and Exiles. He had been admitted to the Society in 1924, when his star was already on the wane. In his membership application he had dutifully entered that his address was the Kremlin, his profession ‘writer-revolutionary’, his education high-school level, that he was the son of a ‘colonist-landowner’, and that he had served prison terms in Nikolaev, Odessa, Irkutsk, Alexandrovsk and Moscow.60 From its inception, the Society gradually accumulated a rich fund of memoirs, documents and notices, and published a magazine, Katorga i ssylka (Hard Labour and Exile). Trotsky had intended to dip into this fount of information for his History.
When he completed his magnum opus, he was not aware that the Society had only a matter of months left to live. Following ‘checks and inspection’, Ya. Peters and P. Pospelov reported to the boss of the Party Control Commission, Yezhov, and his deputy M. Shkiryatov, that ‘on 1 April, 1935 there were 1307 Party members in the Society and 1494 non-Party members. Former members of other parties represent 57 per cent of the membership.’ They further reported that former SRs and Mensheviks were ‘closely united by old ties’. Following the assassination of the Leningrad Party boss Kirov in December 1934, ‘forty to fifty members of the Society were arrested’. Peters and Pospelov clearly felt that their masters would want to know that ‘the SR Andreev, the Mensheviks Driker, Tipulkov and Feldman and others call the NKVD “the Okhranka” [the nickname of the old tsarist secret police]’, and that ‘in their publications they refer to Bakunin, Lavrov, Tkachev, Radishchev, Ogarev, Lunin et al’. Half of the writers in the journal were Populists, SRs and Mensheviks, there were articles on Nietzsche and Kerensky, and ‘one of the articles stated that “there would have been no October had there been no February”.’ The Society idealized the Cossacks and indirectly cast doubt ‘on some of the classic positions taken by Comrade Stalin’. Things had gone so far, indeed, that the former convicts shared the belief that ‘the Society must defend its members should they be arrested by the Soviet regime as well.’ The report concluded by effectively raising the question of liquidating the Society.61 Stalin of course approved this proposal, and the Society was disbanded soon after. Gorky obtained Stalin’s permission to remove most of its library for the Union of Writers, while Voroshilov took over the Society’s rest home at Sochi for his own commissariat.62
Trotsky shared the view of many members of the Society that the revolution had occurred not only because the old world had reached a crisis point, but because unsustainable impatience had erupted to cause the explosion. Catastrophes and upheavals of any kind can often facilitate the eruption of revolution, and in the case of the Russian revolution, Trotsky wrote, the necessary catastrophe was the First World War. Superficially, his History may seem to be an account of the activities of the Central Committee, the Soviets and so on, but in fact he unobtrusively wove into his narrative the idea of the underlying links between the mood of the masses, the classes and different nations with the situation as it was. As an orthodox Marxist, however, he could not doubt for an instant the ‘historic right’ of the Communists to remake the world by force.
An original feature of the History is Trotsky’s constant awareness of the French revolution as a point of reference. All the leaders of the Russian revolution were Jacobins, and they often measured their own efforts by the benchmarks established by Robespierre, Marat, Danton and Saint-Just. During critical moments in 1918-19 Trotsky mentally placed himself in the Convention and the Committee of Public Safety. His most powerful analytical weapons he reserved for the ‘Thermidore’, or Stalinist reaction. He interpreted Stalin’s emergence as occurring naturally, at the stage when genuinely revolutionary forces lose their vigilance and a new privileged caste takes root in the fertile soil of change. When the festival of the revolution ends, he wrote, it is followed by grey, cold and hungry workdays. Not everyone, he said, was able to grasp that ‘the deprivation is not a result of the revolution, but merely a step towards a better future’. The grey workdays, however, always chilled the spirit of the revolution, and this was a source of the reaction. Comparing the French and Soviet periods of reaction, Trotsky sought the inner logic of the process itself: ‘The French Thermidore, begun by left-wing Jacobins, eventually turned into reaction against the Jacobins in general. Terrorist, Montaignard and Jacobin became terms of abuse. In the provinces they cut down the trees of liberty and trampled tricolour cockades underfoot.’ Things were different in Russia: ‘The totalitarian party included in itself all the elements required for reaction and it mobilized them under the official banner of revolution. The Party suffered no competition even in the struggle with its enemies. The struggle against the Trotskyists did not become a struggle against the Bolsheviks, because the Party swallowed this struggle whole, setting certain limits for it, as if in the name of Bolshevism.’63
Returning repeatedly to the theme of the relationship between ‘the leaders, the Party, the class and the masses’, Trotsky asserted that these elements were rarely in balance. His depiction of the enemies of October was generally graphic and on the whole correct, but whether writing about Nicholas II, Kerensky or Prokopovich, he was universally dismissive. He was of course no less scathing at times about personalities in his own camp, but in this he conformed perfectly to the norms set by Marx and brought to perfection by Lenin, Stalin and most of the other Bolsheviks when they were involved in theoretical debate with friend or foe.
Naturally, Trotsky wrote a great deal about Lenin, eloquently and with great psychological insight, yet, after reading his History one is left with the sense that the cult of Lenin, against which both he and Lenin had protested, may well have had its origins
in Trotsky’s own writings. The notion that Trotsky could find only positive qualities in Lenin is hard to swallow. Before the revolution Trotsky had uttered many unflattering things about the Party’s leader, but after it he adopted a note of pure praise. He certainly failed to take account of the fact that Lenin was not averse to flattery, even if he knew how to hide it. Angelica Balabanova, who had known Lenin well, noted that he ‘needed accomplices rather than collaborators. Trustworthiness to him meant absolute certainty that an individual would carry out all orders, including those contrary to his conscience.’64
There were other flaws in the founder of Bolshevism to which Trotsky was blind, among them his defence of the dictatorship of the proletariat, his making an absolute value of the class struggle, his conviction that social democracy was fundamentally wrong, and much else that Trotsky accepted as the postulates of divine teaching. Since he was firmly convinced that the October revolution could not have happened without Lenin, Trotsky depicted Lenin not merely as a messiah, but as the person bearing responsibility for the act of revolution itself. But, of course, in raising Lenin to the very summit of historical justification, Trotsky was surreptitiously also placing himself on the pedestal of history, since he had so often been named as the second man of the revolution. And he used his defence of Lenin as a weapon in the fight against the new leader. He was therefore particularly outraged when the Soviet press began putting Stalin alongside Lenin. On 5 August 1935 Pravda published an article by David Zaslavsky, celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the death of Engels and proclaiming that ‘the wonderful friendship of Marx-Engels, which is worthy of study, was repeated not by accident in the wonderful collaboration, the great friendship of Lenin-Stalin’. Trotsky responded with an article entitled ‘How They Write History and Biography’, in which he wrote: ‘After this, the son of a bitch squats and awaits encouragement.’65